Today we take a closer at the IdeaPad G470, a mid ranged machine from Lenovo which was released to the market not too long ago, and find out if it is just another cookie cutter pretender or a serious contender in the mid market range.

Priced at RM2299, the Lenovo IdeaPad G470 comes equipped with a decent specification sheet. It runs a 2nd Generation Intel Core i5-2410M Processor (2.30GHz up to 2.90GHz with Turbo boost 2.0, 3MB L3 Cache) with 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM. The machine comes with a 14-inch WXGA LED display (wooo...), and graphics processing come courtesy of a ATI Radeon HD 6370 1GB. In terms of storage, the G470 runs a 640GB 5400RPM SATA HDD, and it is rounded off with a dual-layer multiburner drive.

For most mid ranged machines, that’s usually where the joy stops but since the G470 comes from Lenovo, it also comes with a whole throng of software based enhancements which have trickled down from the ThinkPad range of machines.

One of the extremely useful enhancements is called Energy Management, and this app works to protect the long-term life of the 6-cell battery by providing a set of advanced battery management tweaks. Through the software, you can choose if you want to optimize the battery to prolong your usage run time or if you want to prolong your battery’s lifespan. By choosing the latter option, the G470 will automatically stop charging when the battery reaches a 50% charge, since a full battery charge will degrade your battery’s lifespan at a quicker rate.

Another bonus that you’ll get with the G470 is Lenovo’s tweaked version of Windows 7 called Lenovo Enhanced Experience 2.0 for Windows 7. Exclusive to a number of Lenovo products, this tweaked version allows Windows 7 to boot up on the machine in approximately 20 seconds. On paper, this is 28% faster than regular Windows 7 boot up times, and definitely a welcome addition to any notebook.

Just by looking at the specifications, you can already tell that the Lenovo IdeaPad G470 will excel at all of today’s rudimentary computing tasks such as word processing, web surfing and Flash casual gaming. We obviously wouldn’t recommend it as a hardcore gaming rig, but Intel Core i5 processors are known to be able to handle a fair number of current titles without breaking a sweat.

Now that we’ve talked about what the Lenovo IdeaPad G470 is like on paper, we’ll touch a little more on what we felt about it in the flesh and how it stacked up against the claims.

Weighing in at about 2.2kg, the G470 isn’t exactly the lightest machine of its class. Thankfully this translates to build quality, as the G470 is pretty sturdily built. The hinges on the display are nice and tight, and the metal palm rest is a nice touch of finishing as well.

Equipped with a chiclet styled keyboard, the typing experience on the G470 does require a little getting used to. Compared to the chiclet keyboard on the higher end Lenovo ThinkPad X1, the keyboard on the G470 feels more crammed up due to the extra row of keys to the right. Although this isn’t a deal breaker, the typing experience on the X1 is much more natural when compared to the G470.

The G470 comes with three USB ports and an eSATA/USB combo port (three on the left, one on the right) and we found this extremely handy since we could plug in our Logitech Unifying receiver on the right and use the ports on the left for all our other devices. There is also a HDMI port, a display port and a LAN port on the left of the device, while the audio jacks are tucked in on the right.

One thing which we found to be extremely annoying was the finish on the lid. Made of shiny plastic like most notebooks in this range, the lid was a fingerprint magnet. Although the annoyance of having to constantly wipe smudges off the lid is a relatively small one, this kind of finish also attracts scratches very easily.

Performance wise, the G470 took everything we threw at it in full stride. We loaded up 1080p HD videos, HD Youtube streams, web surfing sessions with multiple tabs opened, endless-columned spreadsheets and the occasional game of DotA too, and found the G470 to be able to complete each and every task when set on high performance mode.

There really isn’t much more to say about the Lenovo IdeaPad G470, since it does have a somewhat limited feature set due to its price. However, based on our week long usage, we found it to be an extremely decent machine. In short, we’re calling this one a good bang for your buck.

What sets it apart from the competition is definitely the added Lenovo software tweaks. Whilst we usually disregard most preinstalled software as bloatware, the software on the G470 is pretty handy. The 6-cell battery (and your wallet) will thank you for using Energy Management, especially if you constantly have your notebook hooked up to a power supply, and you’ll probably fall in love with the snappier boot up times just like how we did.

Before we end, we want to highlight that the machine which we tested came with 4GB of RAM instead of the 2GB as stated on the specification sheet. We’re not sure how much it will cost to bump up the RAM count, but if you can afford it, it is a sound investment to any Windows machine.

The Lenovo IdeaPad G470 retails for RM2299, and is currently available in Lenovo outlets across the country. You can also join the *********** forum discussion thread on the Lenovo IdeaPad G470 here .

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